Amazon

History

1994–2010

On July 5, 1994, Amazon was founded as "Cadabra" by Jeff Bezos, after he relocated from New York City to Bellevue, Washington, to operate an online bookstore. Bezos chose Seattle for its abundance of technical talent from Microsoft and the University of Washington, as well as its smaller population and the proximity to a major book distribution warehouse in Roseburg, Oregon. Seattle beat out Portland, Oregon and Boulder, Colorado.

In November 1994, Bezos renamed the company Amazon to reflect his ambitions for his company. (Amazon is the world's largest river.)

On July 16, 1995, the Amazon website launched, initially sourcing its books directly from wholesalers and publishers.

In May 1997, Amazon went public.

In 1998, Amazon began selling music and videos. It began international operations by acquiring online booksellers in the UK and Germany. In 1999, it expanded to sell more products, including music, video games, consumer electronics, home improvement items, software, games, and toys.

In 2000, US toy retailer Toys "R" Us entered into a 10-year agreement with Amazon, valued at $50 million per year plus a cut of sales, under which Toys "R" Us would be the exclusive supplier of toys and baby products on the service, and the chain's website would redirect to Amazon's Toys & Games category. In 2004, Toys "R" Us sued Amazon, claiming that because of a perceived lack of variety in Toys "R" Us stock, Amazon had knowingly allowed third-party sellers to offer items on the service in categories that Toys "R" Us had been granted exclusivity. In 2006, a court ruled in favor of Toys "R" Us, giving it the right to unwind its agreement with Amazon and establish its independent e-commerce website. The company was later awarded $51 million in damages.

In 2001, Amazon entered into a similar agreement with Borders, under which Amazon would comanage Borders.com as a co-branded service. Borders pulled out of the arrangement in 2007.

In 2002, the company launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), which initially focused on providing APIs for web developers to build web applications on top of Amazon's e-commerce platform. In 2004, AWS expanded to provide website popularity statistics and web crawler data from its Alexa Web Information Service. AWS later shifted toward providing enterprise services with Simple Storage Service (S3) in 2006, and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in 2008, allowing companies to rent data storage and computing power.

2011–2020

On October 18, 2011, Amazon.com announced a partnership with DC Comics for the exclusive digital rights to many popular comics, including Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Sandman, and Watchmen. The partnership caused booksellers such as Barnes & Noble to remove these titles from its shelves.

Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, a warehouse automation company, in 2012.

Amazon bought Goodreads in March 2013.

In November 2013, Amazon announced a partnership with the US Postal Service to begin delivering orders on Sundays. The service, included in Amazon's standard shipping rates, initiated in metropolitan areas of Greater Los Angeles and New York, with plans to expand into Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix by 2014.

Amazon acquired Twitch in August 2014 for $970 million.

In November 2015, Amazon opened a physical Amazon Books store in University Village in Seattle. The store was 5,500 square feet and prices for all products matched those on its website. Amazon opened its tenth physical bookstore in 2017. All locations were closed in 2022 along with other retail locations under the "Amazon 4-Star" brand.

In July 2016, the company announced that it was opening a 1,100,000 ft (335,280.0 m) square foot facility in Palmer Township in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania. As of 2024, Amazon is the Lehigh Valley region's third-largest employer.

In June 2017, Nike agreed to sell products through Amazon in exchange for better policing of counterfeit goods. This proved unsuccessful and Nike withdrew from the partnership in November 2019. Companies including IKEA and Birkenstock also stopped selling through Amazon around the same time, citing similar frustrations over business practices and counterfeit goods.

Amazon purchased Whole Foods Market supermarket chain for $13.7 billion in 2017. It had over 300 million active customer accounts as of 2020.

2021–present

On July 5, 2021 Bezos moved from CEO to executive board chair. Former AWS CEO Andy Jassy replaced him as CEO. In January 2023, Amazon cut over 18,000 jobs, primarily in consumer retail and its human resources division in an attempt to cut costs.

In September 2021, Amazon announced the launch of Astro, its first household robot.

On November 8, 2023, a plan was adopted for Jeff Bezos to sell approximately 50 million shares of the company over the next year with a deadline of January 31, 2025. The first step was the sale of 12 million shares for about $2 billion.

In 2023, Amazon invested $1.25B in Anthropic. In return Anthropic designated AWS as a primary cloud partner and began using Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips. Anthropic Claude models became available on Amazon Bedrock. In March 2024, Amazon invested a further $2.75B. In November, Amazon invested $4B more. In April 2026, Amazon invested $5B.

In January 2023, Amazon announced the launch of RXPass, a prescription drug delivery service..

In February 2024, Amazon announced its first chatbot, "Rufus", for use in the US; in July it was widely available to all customers in the US. "Rufus" is available in the US, India and the UK to help shoppers get product recommendations, shopping list advice, compare products, and see what other customers have responded to regarding their specific questions.

On February 26, 2024, Amazon became a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

On December 19, 2024, Amazon workers, led by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters labor union, went on strike against Amazon in at least four states.

On October 8, 2025, Amazon launched prescription vending machines at One Medical clinics in Los Angeles. The machines are operated by Amazon Pharmacy and are able to prescribe a range of common medications, such as antibiotics, inhalers and blood pressure treatments.

Products and services

Amazon.com

Amazon.com sells products in many categories, including media (books, movies, music, and software), apparel, baby products, consumer electronics, beauty products, gourmet food, groceries, health and personal care products, industrial and scientific supplies, kitchen items, jewelry, watches, lawn and garden items, musical instruments, sporting goods, tools, automotive items, toys and games, and farm supplies and consulting services. Amazon websites are country-specific (for example, amazon.com for the US and amazon.co.uk for UK) though some offer international shipping.

Visits to amazon.com grew from 615 million annual visitors in 2008, to more than 2 billion per month in 2022. The e-commerce platform is the world's 12th most visited.

Results generated by Amazon's search engine are partly determined by promotional fees. The company's localized storefronts, which differ in selection and prices, are differentiated by top-level domain and country code:

Amazon sells many products under its own brand names, including phone chargers, batteries, and diaper wipes. and features hundreds of product lines. Amazon owned 34 private-label brands as of 2019. These brands account for 0.15% of Amazon's global sales, whereas the average for other large retailers is 18%. Other Amazon retail brands include AmazonBasics, Presto!, Mama Bear, and Amazon Essentials.

Amazon derives many of its sales (around 40% in 2008) from third-party sellers who sell products on Amazon. Some other large e-commerce sellers use Amazon to sell their products in addition to selling direct. Orders are processed through Amazon.com and end up at individual sellers for processing and order. Some sellers lease space from Amazon. Small sellers of used and new goods go to Amazon Marketplace to offer goods.

Publishers can sign up as affiliates and receive a commission for referring customers to Amazon by placing links to Amazon on their websites should the referral result in a sale. Worldwide, Amazon had over 900,000 affiliates (2010). As of mid-2014, the Amazon Affiliate Program was used by 1.2% of all websites and was the second most popular advertising network after Google Ads. It is frequently used by sellers and non-profits to provide a way for supporters to earn them a commission.

Services

Amazon services include its digital assistant Alexa, Amazon Music, and Prime Video for music and videos respectively, the Amazon Appstore for Android apps. Audible provides audiobooks for purchase and listening.

RXPass is a US prescription drug delivery service. US Amazon Prime members can pay a $5 monthly fee for access to 60 medications. Beneficiaries of government healthcare programs such as Medicare and Medicaid are not eligible.

Amazon Live is an e-commerce live-streaming service. The service allows promoters to stream live videos promoting or sponsoring products. Promoters (mainly celebrities or Internet influencers) can add tags to add context. Other users can watch and send messages to a global chat for any stream. In 2023 roughly a billion total viewers watched streams in the US and India. The platform is integrated into Amazon Freevee and Amazon Prime Video.

Hardware

Amazon offers the Kindle line of electronic paper e-readers, Fire and Fire HD color LCD tablets.

Astro is a household robot, powered by Alexa. It can be remote-controlled, to check on pets, people, or home security. It notifies owners of unusual events.

Subsidiaries

Amazon owns over 100 subsidiaries, including Amazon Web Services, Audible, Diapers.com, Goodreads, IMDb, Kiva Systems (now Amazon Robotics), One Medical, Shopbop, Teachstreet, Twitch, Zappos, and Zoox.

Other Amazon subsidiaries include:

A9.com, a company focused on researching and building innovative technology; it became a subsidiary in 2003.

Amazon Academy, formerly JEE Ready, an online learning platform for engineering students, launched by Amazon India on January 13, 2021

Amazon Maritime, Inc., a non-vessel-owning common carrier (NVOCC), which enables the company to manage its shipments from China ocean shipments.

Amazon Pharmacy, an online prescription drug delivery service, launched in November 2020. The service provides discounts up to 80% for generic drugs and up to 40% for branded drugs for Prime subscribers. The products can be purchased on the company's website or at over 50,000 brick-and-mortar pharmacies in the US.

Annapurna Labs, an Israel-based microelectronics company reputedly for US$350–370M, acquired by Amazon Web Services in January 2015 .

Beijing Century Joyo Courier Services, a freight forwarder.

Brilliance Audio, an audiobook publisher. The company was purchased by Amazon in 2007 for an undisclosed amount.

ComiXology, a cloud-based digital comics platform with over 200 million comic downloads as of September 2013. It offers a selection of more than 40,000 comic books and graphic novels across Android, iOS, Fire OS and Windows 8 devices and over a web browser. Amazon bought the company in April 2014.

CreateSpace, provider of self-publishing services for independent content creators, publishers, film studios, and music labels. It became a subsidiary in 2009.

Operations

Headquarters

Amazon's global headquarters occupy more than 40 buildings spread across Seattle's adjacent South Lake Union, Denny Triangle, and Downtown neighborhoods. The first 14 buildings Amazon occupied in South Lake Union were purchased for $1.16 billion in 2016. The company was previously headquartered in rented space within the Pacific Medical Center, from 1998 to 2011.

Amazon built a four tower, four low-rise, complex in Seattle's Denny Triangle neighborhood to serve as primary headquarters, though it retained many other buildings to house its more than 45,000 corporate employees. The new campus was designed by NBBJ and named "Rufus 2.0" after a dog, once a fixture of the company. Construction began in 2013. The first tower, nicknamed Doppler, opened on December 14, 2015.

Other major campuses

Amazon's European headquarters are in Luxembourg's capital, Luxembourg. Its UK headquarters are at Principal Place, Shoreditch, London.

Amazon is also in the process of building a retail hub of operations center in Nashville, Tennessee.

On August 21, 2019, Amazon opened its largest campus in the world at Nanakramguda in Hyderabad, India. It is the first Amazon-owned campus located outside the US and features the single largest Amazon-owned building in the world. The 9.5-acre campus houses over 15,000 employees.

In December 2023 Amazon opened its 14-acre Amazon Africa headquarters. in Riverlands in Cape Town, South Africa.

Amazon built a major campus in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, to host 15,000 employees. The company opened its first Bellevue office in 2017. Amazon's largest building in the city is Sonic, a 42-story building, with 1 million square feet (93,000 m2) of office space. It opened in 2024. The Bellevue campus included the 43-story Bellevue 600 tower, the tallest building in the city and the tallest developed by Amazon.

Software development

While much of Amazon's software development occurs in Seattle, the company employs software developers in centers across the globe. Some of these sites are run by subsidiary A2Z Development.

Retail

Amazon once operated various retail store brands, but later closed all save for Whole Foods. Most of the stores are located inside of the US, but Whole Foods also operates stores in Canada and the UK, while Amazon Go has six locations in London under the Amazon Fresh name.

Whole Foods Market (557 locations as of June 2026)

Logistics

Amazon uses many transportation services to move packages. Amazon-branded services include:

Amazon Air, a cargo airline for bulk transport, with last-mile delivery handled either by Amazon Flex, Amazon Logistics, or USPS.

Amazon Flex, a smartphone app that enables individuals to act as independent contractors, delivering packages to customers from personal vehicles without uniforms. Deliveries include one or two hour service via Prime Now, and standard Amazon.com orders, in addition to orders from local stores that contract with Amazon.

Amazon Freight, a freight brokerage and logistics service

Amazon Logistics, in which Amazon contracts with small businesses (Delivery Service Partners) to perform deliveries to customers. Each business has a fleet of approximately 20–40 Amazon-branded vans; contractor employees wear Amazon uniforms. As of December 2020, it operated in the US, Canada, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the UK.

Amazon Prime Air is an experimental drone delivery service that delivers packages via drones to Amazon Prime subscribers in select cities.

Amazon directly employs workers at its warehouses, bulk distribution centers, staffed Amazon Hub Locker+ locations, and delivery stations where drivers pick up packages. As of December 2020, it was not hiring delivery drivers as employees.

Rakuten Intelligence estimated that in 2020 in the US, the proportion of last-mile deliveries by Amazon's directly contracted services was 56% (mostly in urban areas), 30% by USPS (mostly in rural areas), and 14% by UPS. In April 2021, Amazon reported it had increased its in-house delivery capacity by 50% in the last 12 months (which included the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US).

Pickup points

In addition to Amazon Lockers, Amazon staffed around 30 pickup points in the US and over 800 independent points in India. US locations had large sets of Amazon Lockers and an area for customers to make returns. The India locations were in existing retailers where customers wait for a store employee to retrieve their package.

Supply chain

Amazon launched its distribution network in 1997 with fulfillment centers in Seattle and New Castle, Delaware. Amazon has several types of distribution facilities including cross-dock centers, fulfillment centers, sorting centers, delivery stations, Prime now hubs, and Prime air hubs. As of 2018 the US had 75 fulfillment centers and 25 sorting centers with over 125,000 employees. Employees are responsible for:

unpacking and inspecting incoming goods

placing goods in storage and recording their location

picking goods from their computer recorded locations to make up an individual shipment

sorting and packing orders

shipping

A picker may walk 10 or more miles a day. Employees carry hand-held computers that monitor their progress. Some warehouses are partially automated with systems built by Amazon Robotics. Amazon fulfillment centers host hundreds or thousands of employees.

The Fulfillment By Amazon program handles storage, packing and distribution of products and services for small sellers. Third-party sellers can use FBA to ship for other platforms, such as eBay.

In some fulfillment centers, items are stored on pods and are brought to pickers by four-wheeled robots. The robot slides under and lifts a pod slightly off the ground, before carrying it to a picker station.

In the US, many workers are hired as Amazon employees and granted shares of stock or sign-on bonuses, while others are offered seasonal positions.

Corporate affairs

Board of directors

As of August 2025, Amazon's board of directors were:

Jeff Bezos, executive chairman, Amazon.com, Inc.

Andy Jassy, president and CEO, Amazon.com, Inc.

Keith B. Alexander, CEO of IronNet Cybersecurity, former NSA director

Edith W. Cooper, co-founder of Medley and former EVP of Goldman Sachs

Jamie Gorelick, partner, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr

Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

Andrew Ng, co-founder, Coursera

Indra Nooyi, former CEO, PepsiCo

Jon Rubinstein, former chairman and CEO, Palm, Inc.

Brad D. Smith, president, Marshall University

Patty Stonesifer, president and CEO, Martha's Table

Wendell Weeks, chairman, president and CEO, Corning Inc.

Ownership

The 10 largest shareholders of Amazon at the end of October 2025:

Finances

Amazon.com started as a retail site. Amazon takes a percentage of the price of each item that it sells. It also allows companies to advertise their products by paying to be listed as featured products. In Forbes Global 2000 Amazon ranked 36th (2023).

For fiscal year 2021, Amazon reported earnings of $33.36 billion, with revenue of US$469.82 billion, a YOY increase of 21.7%.

Corporate culture

Jeff Bezos became renowned for his annual shareholder letters. These letters expressed Bezos's perspectives and strategic focus. A common theme was his desire to instill customer-centricity (in his words, "customer obsession") at all levels of Amazon, notably by making all senior executives field customer support queries for a time at Amazon call centers. He read many emails addressed by customers to his public email address. One of Bezos's most well-known internal memos was his mandate for all teams to "expose their data and functionality" through service interfaces "designed from the ground up to be externalizable". This process, commonly known as a service-oriented architecture (SOA), resulted in mandatory dogfooding of services that later became commercialized via AWS.

Amazon used internal recognition programs such as the Just Do It Award to encourage employee initiative.

Amazon’s meeting culture is document-driven. It is designed to encourage deep thinking, shared context, and efficient decision-making, avoiding polished presentations and large gatherings. Practices:

Narrative memos: Amazon bans slide decks in favor of detailed memos—typically 4–6 pages of complete sentences and paragraphs (not bullet points). These are intended to reveal weak or incomplete ideas. Memos may take significant time (days or longer) to prepare, sometimes collaboratively.

Reading: Meetings commonly begin with reading the memo in silence. The information is fresh in attendees' minds, and discussion begins using a shared context.

Two-pizzas: Teams and meetings are small enough that two pizzas could feed the attendees (6–8 or fewer people).

“Messy,” exploratory discussions: meeting conversations are unscripted, encouraged to wander, explore controversy, expose dissenting views, and explore ideas deeply. Bezos preferred a “crisp document and a messy meeting.” Senior voices often delay speaking so juniors can contribute freely. The approach elevates written clarity over persuasion or hierarchy. Meetings may include an empty chair to represent the customer.

Lobbying

Amazon lobbies governments on issues such as the enforcement of sales taxes on online sales, transportation safety, privacy and data protection, and intellectual property. According to regulatory filings, Amazon.com focuses its US lobbying on the US Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Reserve. In 2019, it spent $16.8 million and had a team of 104 lobbyists.

Amazon.com was a corporate member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) until it dropped membership following protests at its shareholders' meeting on May 24, 2012.

In 2014, Amazon expanded its lobbying practices as it prepared to lobby the Federal Aviation Administration to approve its drone delivery program, hiring the Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld lobbying firm in June. Amazon and its lobbyists have visited with Federal Aviation Administration officials and aviation committees in Washington, D.C. to explain its plans to deliver packages. In September 2020 this moved one step closer with the granting of a critical certificate by the FAA.

During the second Trump Administration, Amazon donated several times to various events and aspects of his presidency. Along with several other major companies, Amazon donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund. In April 2025, Amazon was a corporate sponsor of the White House Easter Egg Roll, after Donald Trump solicited corporate sponsors for the event for the first time. In October 2025, Amazon was listed among the donors funding the construction of the White House State Ballroom.

Amazon lobbies on climate policy internationally. In the US, following Trump’s 2025 inauguration, Amazon began frequent engagements with the executive branch to advocate for permitting reform and energy development to support data center growth. In July 2025, Amazon joined policymakers at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, where it supported the development of nuclear energy to meet growing electricity demand, and lobbied for permitting reform to support grid development nationwide. Amazon sponsored the Conservative Coalition for Climate Solutions’ (C3) Energy Summit in Washington D.C. in December 2025, which brought together administration officials and industry representatives to discuss meeting the country’s growing electricity demand through modernization of the permitting process, investment in energy infrastructure, and scaling new technologies. A December 2025 DeSmog article reported that the company’s sponsorship came alongside several organizations that had supported climate change denial, and a continued role for fossil fuels to meet growing energy demand. In 2026, Amazon spent $5 million lobbying against the Delivery Protection Act, a New York City bill introduced by Tiffany Cabán that would require companies like Amazon to directly employ last mile delivery drivers and warehouse workers, as well as set licensing, safety, and training requirements for last mile facilities.